It had been 30 years since she received the letter. Thirty long years, but she couldn’t bring herself to destroy it, couldn’t even throw it away. The contents had almost destroyed her at the time turning her into a madwoman, screaming and wailing and beating the walls until her hands bled.

It had been a micrometeorite that had punched through the ship’s skin, nothing more really than a speck of dust. It had been captured by the upsilon-rho detector and in a moment, her life’s work had disappeared.

The formal letter that she subsequently received from the University of Space Science was quietly condescending, suggesting that her preliminary research had been unsound and superficial. In other words, a death knell for her career.

It was now hanging in a frame on the wall of her office alongside a subsequent apology which was written many years later after a reinterpretation of the data had proved that she had in fact been correct.

Contrasting with the policy of her predecessor, she insisted that her door was open at all times but it always gave her a thrill of pleasure when glancing at the title plate she read “Director of the University of Space Science”.